Our work emerges in this juxtaposition between digitality and comic-book sequentiality. Applications like Comixology have fundamentally transformed the comics industry, threatening the dominance of the direct market while also making it possible for more independent authors to find audiences. At the same time, webcomics and digitally-enhanced works like Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile have offered creators new creative techniques to enhance traditional work, while digitial dissemination has enabled the success of comics-as-scholarship such as Jason Helms’s Rhizcomics, Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening, and Anastasia Salter and Roger Whitson’s edited issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly titled “Comics as Scholarship.” As Aaron Kashtan argues, the comic book has “been even more curiously resistant to replacement by digital equivalents than other genres of books, […] and may therefore offer valuable lessons about the continuing role that printed books might play in the digital age” (3).
Roger Whitson opens the panel with “Which Came First, Comics or Film or […]? A Media Archaeology of Comic Book Sequentiality." Inspired by the data-driven efforts of What Were Comics? Whitson critiques McCloud’s definition of comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” by showing how film has also been formally described in the same way (9). Instead of offering a separate definition, Whitson presents a series of episodes in comics and film history in which an aesthetic advance in one medium inspires an advance in the other. What he calls, following the media theorist Friedrich Kittler, the recursive history of comics and film involves the mutual adaptation and remediation of techniques between the two. As a particular example of this recursive history, he examines the cinematic techniques in the early comic artist Winsor McCay (1866-1934), known primarily for his dream-influenced strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. Whitson ends the talk by exploring how the post-cinematic theories of Steven Shaviro, Shane Densen, and Julia Leyda can help understand comic sequentiality beyond the comic book.
The condition of comics beyond the book also animates efforts to archive and present comics in digital archives. Kathryn Manis’s “Born Digital Comics in Academic Archives” reviews efforts to digitize comics in collections like The Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum and with tools such as John Walsh’s Comic Book Markup Language – showing how both are based upon print assumptions about the object of archival work. Her work proposes strategies for better integrating born-digital comics into print collections, while also recognizing the distinct ontological problems emerging with such efforts. Considering Matt Kirschenbaum’s argument that preservation in born-digital collections is never simply preservation, but that each instance of accessing digital files “constitutes a distinct instance of a file that will be addressed and stored in a unique location in computer memory,” Manis shows the shared implications for comics studies and the digital humanities in archiving born-digital sequential art. In particular, the push in library and curatorial practice to better archive and make accessible image-based materials have implications for understanding how reading and searching processes for comics have changed when they occur on digital applications. Additional considerations include popular and academic interactions in library contexts and the ways that emerging technologies unsettle such distinctions.
The complexities of digitization and comics are also explored in Madeline Gangnes’s “Comics Architected: Translation Augmentation with Structural Integrity.” Comics as a medium has architectural properties. The visual “surface” of a comic is not only drawn, but also constructed using discrete images and the spaces between them. Skilled comics artists manipulate a reader’s perception of motion, space, and time through their positioning of visual elements. This presents significant challenges when approaching comics through augmented reality; the meanings created by the visual architecture of a comic are easily disrupted, even by small additions or alterations. Comics are often augmented for novelty or advertising, with little or no thought given to how comics function. Using a digital humanities project called “Comics ARchitected,” this paper demonstrates that when augmenting comics, it is vital to consider their structural integrity. “Comics ARchitected,” constructed in HP Reveal, augments non-English-language word balloons in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics in a way that offers English translations without disrupting the fragile architecture of the comics page.
Finally, the possibilities of composing in digital media inform Nicholas Brown’s “”I'll figure it out on the ‘page’’: the Digitization of a Comics Methodology.” Nick Sousanis argues in Unflattening (2015) that “drawing is a way of seeing and thus, a way of knowing, in which we touch more directly the perceptual and embodied processes underlying thinking.” Although recent special issues (Visual Arts Research, 2012; Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2015) and a newly founded journal (Sequentials) support Sousanis’ assertion, these outlets (amongst others) have only just begun to consider how the confluence of materials, modes, and media influence the arguments scholars make. In this paper I discuss the production of my in-progress comics dissertation, The Rousing of Ogma: Developing Functional Methodologies for the Production of Multimodal Scholarship, and reveal how my shift from analog to digital production alters both my research methods and the arguments I offer. First, I reveal how the switch to digital improved and quickened my workflow. Next, I examine how I remediate analog practices in digital spaces. Finally, I forecast the sorts of problems one might encounter producing comics digitally.